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Trail:

To the Ends of the Earth

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As we dug the samples, our conversation began to question the mining corporation’s perspective on Groote syndrome and how they were misappropriating this whole health problem onto genetics. Whilst it is true that it is largely only the Lalara family who have been experiencing the neurological problems of Groote syndrome, neither of us could see how this observation alone was sufficient to nail down a genetic-only cause. Dennis made reference to a map of Groote which demarcated the borders of the original territories of the different Aboriginal clans. This map clearly indicated that the original territory of the Lalara clan precisely encompasses the manganese enriched eastern area of Groote Eylandt. So even during nomadic times, the Lalara clan would have been hunting - gathering foodstuffs that were almost exclusively grown off the high manganese soils and sea bed. Even the crabs and turtles which they consumed, had derived their nourishment from a food chain that was directly dependent upon the cracks and crevices of the manganese laterite seashore platform.

I was dropped back at the Mission with my samples, to hear the sad news that Ernie Lalara had just died of Groote syndrome in Darwin Hospital. I had sadly never met the man, since he had left the Mission the morning that I arrived. 

The place was being rapidly evacuated because Aboriginal people do not believe in occupying the living quarters of a person who has just died. 

They have to smoke the spirit out before they can return. This is conducted as a ceremony where the deceased’s home is surrounded by a ring of dead vegetation, and then set alight to smoulder.

I had to rush to get Warren and wheel him off the Mission premises fast. I needed to take him to his surviving sister Gayangwa’s house, so he could join in the family mourning. Warren looked mortified. His eyes were lifeless, fixed in a glazed, vacant stare. I did not know how to console the poor guy over the death of his uncle. I felt sure that Warren was also reflecting on how he would be the next one to go; victim to this slowly encroaching grotesque condition.

I left him at the front gate of Gayangwa’s house. She had come outside with an unusual air of silence about her, to take Warren over from me, to wheel him the last little stretch to the front door. Aboriginal mourning sessions can reach bizarre extremes; well, when you compare them with the inhibited practises of western funeral rites. The women can smash themselves with stones, often drawing blood .

Back at the Mission building there was a strange silence - no longer the patter of kiddies feet across the veranda boarding. No longer the bouts of screaming and crying wafting over from the village.

With renewed purpose, I spent the rest of the day alone in the forest picking / digging samples of the indigenous fruit such as yam, pandanus and cycad which the Angurugu people had been consuming for years. 

I wrenched and tugged out samples of brittle grasses - slightly restless and agitated - drawing blood now and again on some well concealed thorn barbs. 

I felt the tension of the people, their anxiety over yet another mysterious death from Groote syndrome; where one further member of their finest tribesmen had been unexplainably taken before their time.

Cycads are rather pretty, symmetrical, squat palm trees - often referred to as ‘false palms’ in fact. Or Burrawang by the Aborigines. The fruit was just forming in a neat circle, the brown spherical nuts nestling like eggs ; directly attached onto a crown like structure that is centrally perched on top of the stunted trunk. The fronds of these trees were silvering themselves in the late afternoon sun.

The cycads were virtually growing out of pockets of soil that was deeply etched down into crevices amidst the pure manganese bedrock. After suddenly sensing the similarities between this place and the grykes in the limestone pavements thousands of miles back home in the Burren peninsula (Western Eire), I felt a deep pulse of homesickness surge into my solar plexus.

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Last updated 03 January 2012